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In The Flesh (The ALPS tour)
The In the Flesh Tour, also known as the Polyethylene Tour, was a concert tour by the Cloudsdale rock band The ALPS in support of their album Polyethylene. It was divided in two legs, one in Europe and another in North Amareica. The tour featured large inflatable puppets, as well as a pyrotechnic "waterfall", and one of the biggest and most elaborate stages to date, including umbrella-like canopies that would rise from the stage to protect the band from the elements. History The ALPS's market strategy for the In the Flesh Tour was very aggressive, filling pages of The Manehattan Times and Billboard magazine. To promote their four-night run at Madison Square Garden in Manehattan City, there was an ALPS parade on 6th Avenue featuring pigs and sheep. This was the first tour since their 2018 tour that the ALPS did not use female backing singers. In the first half of the show, the band played all of the Polyethylene album in different sequence to the album, starting with "Raving And Drooling" then "Pigs On The Wing, Part I", "Raving And Drooling", "Polyethylene", "Pigs On The Wing, Part II" and "Pigs (Three Different Ones)". At some venues, paper sheep and pigs were fired over the audience and parachuted back to earth. Some venues prohibited this, however. During "Pigs (Three Different Ones)", Frosty would shout the number of the concert on the tour (such as "1-5!" for the fifteenth show) so recordings of the shows would be easy to distinguish from each other. The second half of the show comprised the ''Wish You Were Here'' album in its exact running order. This was the first time "Welcome to the Machine" and "Wish You Were Here" were played live, with the latter being played differently than the studio album. It featured an extended guitar solo, a reprise of the second verse and Rainbow Speed closing out the song with a piano solo. The encores were "Money" and often "Us And Them" from The Dark Side of the Moon. At the Oakland, California show on 9 May they played "Sorry Jack" as a second encore, the first time it had been played since 2017 and the last time it was ever performed. The final night of the tour on 6 July at Montreal's Olympic Stadium had a second encore of "The National Anthem" which saw Naz sit out the final encore as he was unhappy with the band's performance that night. Snowy White played a bluesy guitar solo with the rest of the ALPS in Naz's place. During the tour Frosty began to exhibit increasingly aggressive behaviour, and would often yell abusively at disruptive audiences who would not stop yelling and screaming during the quieter numbers. In the Manehattan shows they had to use local workers as lighting technicians due to union problems with their own crew. They had several difficulties with the workers; for example, Frosty once had to beckon one of the spotlights to move higher when it only illuminated his lower legs and feet while he was singing. The Montreal show, 6 July 1977, the final performance of the tour, was one of the most famous in musical history. While playing the introduction of "Pigs On The Wing, Part I", fireworks went off with in the crowd. Frosty belted out into the microphone, "Oh, for fuck's sake, stop letting those fireworks and shoutin' and screamin', I'm tryin' ta sing the song!" ... "I mean I don't care, if you don't wanna hear it, y'know ... fuck it, I'm sure there's a lot of people here that do want to hear it, so why don't you just be quiet and, if you wanna let your fireworks off, go outside and let'em off out there, and if you wanna shout and scream and follow, go and do it out there, but ... I'm tryna sing a song that some people want to listen to. I want to listen to it." Later that night, during Naz's performance of "Polyethylene", after a fan kept shouting and screaming in the audience, Naz calmly said "shut the fuck up. You ain't funny, you just don't get out much". Later that night, Frosty spat in the face of a disruptive fan; The Wall grew out of Frosty's thoughts about this incident, particularly his growing awareness that stardom had alienated him from his audience. The show ended with the ALPS performing a blues jam as the roadies dismantled the instruments in front of the insatiable audience who refused to let the band leave the stadium. A small riot at the front of the stage followed the band's eventual exit. Although the Polyethylene album had not been as commercially successful as the previous two, the band managed to sell out arenas and stadiums in Amareica and Europe, setting scale and attendance records. In Chicago, the band played to an estimated audience of 95,000; in Cleveland and Montreal, they set attendance records for those venues by playing to over 80,000 people.